Trust the Wash: Embracing the Chaos Before the Peace
Life is messy. It’s not a revelation, but it’s a truth most people go out of their way to not think about. They pretend their messes don’t exist or, worse, judge others for theirs, as if their own path to “cleanliness” didn’t involve stumbling through chaos. The reality is this: life is either a process of purification or defilement, and neither one is as tidy as we’d like it to be.
The difference between those two paths? Your willingness to confront the mess, endure the chaos, and emerge on the other side. Peace, true peace, doesn’t arrive without upheaval. It’s born from it. The storms that shake you to your core—the ones you curse and resist—are the very forces that cleanse you. Trust the wash.
The Chaos Before the Calm
There’s an undeniable paradox in the journey to peace. To get there, you have to pass through chaos. Not around it. Not over it. Through it. For some, this means shouting prescriptions from the rooftops, railing against injustice, and setting the world ablaze with conviction. For others, it’s a quiet yet ferocious battle within—untangling webs of attachment, breaking down inherited beliefs, and casting off layers of accumulated falsehood.
Both approaches are messy. They’re supposed to be. Before peace can settle in, the poison has to come out. Like a storm that clears the air or a fire that purges a forest of decay, the process is destructive by design. Because there are things within you that need to be destroyed. And here’s the uncomfortable truth: the bigger the mess, the bigger the clean-up team required. Adults may think they’ve outgrown the spills of childhood, but their messes are just magnified—careers upended, relationships shattered, communities fractured. The scale increases, but the root remains the same: we are all children learning as we go.
To judge another for their mess is to dishonor their humanity—and to forget your own. You too have expelled poison. You too have stumbled, raged, and lashed out in your process of purification. Do you think you’re any better? Any cleaner? You’re not. None of us are. And yet, the wash continues.
Letting Go of Attachments
If there’s one universal source of suffering, it’s attachment. Attachment to people, to outcomes, to identities we cling to like life rafts in a storm. The tighter we hold, the more we suffer. Why? Because attachment isn’t love. It’s a need for control disguised as love. It’s demanding the world and the people in it conform to your expectations, instead of meeting it as it is.
Letting go of attachments isn’t about benevolence. It’s not some saintly act of kindness; it’s just radical complexity reduction. You let go because you’re tired of torturing yourself. You release expectations not because you don’t care, but because you care too much to keep inflicting the same wounds both to yourself and to others. And paradoxically, in letting go, you discover something extraordinary: love without chains. Love that doesn’t demand or distort. Love that simply exists, spacious and free.
The Tools for the Path
Life doesn’t hand you a map. But it gives you tools: perspective, choices, conscience, introspection. These are your guideposts, your compass, your course correctors. Use them or ignore them—the choice is yours—but don’t pretend you weren’t equipped for the journey.
Perspective is the lens through which you see the world. It can twist suffering into resentment or reveal it as a catalyst for growth. Your choices are the tangible expressions of that perspective, the forks in the road where you decide, moment by moment, which path to take. Conscience is the voice that whispers, even when you don’t want to hear it, steering you toward integrity. And introspection? That’s the mirror you can’t avoid, reflecting back the truths you’d rather ignore.
Together, these tools are a feedback loop. They show you when you’re straying into defilement and how to realign. They remind you that purification isn’t a one-time event—it’s a daily practice, a deliberate effort to live in truth.
Peace Is a Rebellion
When you finally arrive at peace, it doesn’t look like what you’d expect. It’s not grand or dramatic. It’s quiet, almost absurd in its simplicity. Peace says, “Hang on a minute. You’re all rushing around like mad things. I’m just going to not do that.” It’s a state of being that defies understanding. To the outside world, it looks strange—someone alone, unhurried, radiant with joy for no discernible reason.
Peace doesn’t seek to control or coerce. It doesn’t force itself onto others. It nudges, gently, like a whisper in the chaos. It stands still while the world spins wildly, offering not judgment but contrast—a silent invitation to stop, to breathe, to see that there is another way.
And yet, peace doesn’t arrive without the storm. To reach it, you must first care deeply. You must convulse, shout, express the turbulence within you. Only after that storm subsides can you find the stillness necessary to cultivate peace. This is the paradox: peace is the fruit of passing through chaos. It’s not the absence of struggle but what emerges from it.
The God You Create
At the heart of this journey is one defining truth: the image of God you hold in your mind determines the quality of your life. If that image is unmerciful, unjust, or shrinking, it reflects back into everything you do. But if that image is merciful, righteous, and loving, it becomes a foundation of strength and clarity.
You construct this image not through blind faith but through works—through the trials, the messes, and the grace you encounter along the way, whether you ask for it or whether it manifests by itself. It’s a feedback loop, a mirror of your own becoming. The God you envision shapes your perspective, and in turn, your perspective shapes your life.
Trust the wash. Trust the forces behind it. Let the chaos do its work, knowing that it’s not there to destroy you but to refine you. Life will always be messy. The question isn’t whether you’ll make a mess—it’s whether you’ll let that mess transform you into something greater.
Conclusion
Life isn’t clean. It’s not meant to be. We’re all stumbling through the muck, spilling and breaking as we go. But those messes are the raw material for something extraordinary. Purification is a process, and peace is its product—but only if you’re willing to trust the wash, to embrace the storm, and to let it reveal what’s left after the waters recede. What remains is what matters. What remains is you.